If You Water Cool The New Apple MacBook, It Doubles Performance

Fancy taking a $2000 computer, immersing it in water and praying that the Blu-tack you put over the ports keeps it alive? If you do*, you'll be rewarded with a MacBook that's twice as fast. (*don't ever do this)

The new MacBook is a great machine for productivity on the go, but it can be found wanting for tasks like gaming or video editing. With that in mind, Linus Tech Tips on YouTube decided to immerse the MacBook in a home-made water cooling tray and see if the MacBook performed any better.

You see, the new MacBook is running Intel's new Broadwell chip architecture: a 1.1GHz processor that doesn't require a cooling fan. Without a fan, the laptop can be insanely thin, hence the wow-factor of the new ultra-skinny MacBook. Engineers at Apple have had to make concessions in order to achieve this design, however.

During benchmark testing and any other high-performance computing, the MacBook bursts up from 1.1GHz of power to 2GHz thanks to Intel's Turbo Boost technology, but the heat makes it impossible to sustain over a long term. For that reason, the processor is throttled back from 2GHz when the temperature inside the unit is too high, which can lead to lower processing speeds as you use your machine.

So as an experiment, Linus decided to "seal" the laptop with Blu-tak before resting it carefully in a tray of cooled water. The results are extraordinary: the new MacBook is able to sustain that 2GHz processing speed for an extended period without throttling, and double its benchmark score in Cinebench 3D.

As Linus points out, however, this is a very, very stupid thing to do.

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